Description:

The Eastern Melanesia hotspot covers a large number of small islands, and may hold the highest density of languages per person in the world. Many of the languages in this hotspot are spoken by only a few hundred people, but the level of endangerment is not as severe as in many other hotspots. Despite the small number of speakers, many children learn their ancestral language along with a national language and speakers maintain their language as part of their cultural identity.

The languages of Eastern Melanesia present a challenge to linguists because it is hard to distinguish the boundaries between languages and dialects. For linguists, there is a language boundary if speakers of the two languages cannot understand each other. If they can understand each other, there is only one language with two dialects. In Eastern Melanesia, many small communities consider their language separate from the language spoken in by another group even when they can understand each other's languages. The use of language as part of cultural identity in this area allows these many languages to survive, but it also poses problems for census takers and researchers attempting to count languages.

Some features of languages include:

complex vowel systems, including length distinctions

serial verb constructions

more complex syllables than in other Oceanic languages

Trivia:

The name for the doublebar goatfish in West Nggela (10,000 speakers, Solomon Islands), is Mala bulua, from the words mala, position or rank, and bula, to light with a lamp or torch. Together, they explain the way the fish is caught, by illuminating a reef at low tide and taking fish from the surface of the water.

The Marovo people (8,000 speakers, Solomon Islands) classify schools of fish based on their behavior. For example, fish form chapa schools while they patrol for food, umoro schools when they spot prey, and udumu schools, of fish packed so densely they seem like one object.

Hovid can mean either three days ago or three days from now, depending on context, in Aneityum (600 speakers, Vanuatu)

There are three verbs for 'to go' in Lolovoli (5,000 speakers, Vanuatu) because of the steep hills of the island where it is spoken: 'go up' (hage), 'go across' (vano) and 'go down' (hivo)

Terrill, Angela. 2002. Why make books for people who don't read? A perspective on documentation of an endangered language from Solomon Islands. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 155/156: 205-219.